Bookstorm

Last night, I picked up a twelve-pack of Corona and continued reading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. And then, after reading this funny passage, la cerveza suddenly seemed warm and unappealing.

... and then I said let's try this mezcalito and I handed them two glasses and they sat there looking at the bottle as if they were afraid a dragon might come shooting out of it, and I laughed, but I wasn't laughing at them, I was laughing for sheer glee, it made me so happy just to be there with them, and then one of them asked if they'd heard right, if that was really what the mezcal was called, and I passed them the bottle, still laughing, I knew the name would impress them, and I stepped back a little to get a better look at them, God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books--the memories they brought back!--and then one of them said are you sure this won't kill us, Señor Salvatierra? and I said what do you mean kill you, this is the essence of health, the water of life, drink it without fear, and to set an example, I filled my glass and downed half of it and then I served them, and at first the rascals just wetted their lips, but little by little it grew on them, and they started to drink like men.

Para todo mal, mezcal. Para todo bien, también, as Oaxacans like to say.

John Updike: dead at seventy-six.

Is José Saramago a philosopher or a novelist?

I've been reading The Double, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to read, how quickly the narrative flows. Reader trepidation is understandable, since his style is characterized by run-on sentences and pages-long paragraphs, but I think this only adds to the surreal, dream-like quality of the book. Saramago has a gentle way with words that makes The Double's story--revolving around a history teacher pursuing his doppelgänger--seem lighter than it really is. There's heavy, existential conceit here, but it's pretty charming--like Franz Kafka without the dark tones and tortured characters. The setting and characters are vague, with Saramago, as omniscient narrator, instead taking immense pleasure in relating not only what's going through Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's head, but in what could've been: "As for Maria da Paz, whether or not she continues to be a presence in these pages, for how long and to what end, is up to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, he knows what he will say to her if and when he finally decides to pick up the phone and dial a number he knows by heart." Throughout The Double, there's an undercurrent of contradiction--the narrator hints repeatedly that he's in complete control of Afonso's destiny, but that Afonso is also free to make his own choices. You might think such a contradiction would make The Double an impossible book, but the opposite is true--Saramago's big questions make it much more engaging.

She's beautiful, isn't she?

Have fun, kids.

About thirty pages in, I had a feeling--not wholly unexpected--that Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men would be a dud. Another twenty-five pages and my interest is still lukewarm, at best. Now I'm wondering what could've possessed me to begin a book with such a pretentious title. Then I remembered: it cost a whopping $1.70 at one of my local Borders bookstores.

I went on a date last Tuesday which, she and I both agree, went very well. Even if the date hadn't gone well--and a woman who actually owns William Gaddis, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, among others, is definitely someone I want to see again--there would've been an upshot: as we drove to dinner, I spied an independent bookstore in the plaza. Score!

Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives strikes me as the kind of book I should be reading in a crowded bar, with people yelling for drinks and spilling tequila everywhere. The fact that much of the novel is set in dive bars and cafés has a lot to do with this; Bolaño's Mexico City, filled with prostitutes, violent pimps, and a group of artists known as visceral realists, is richly drawn, and the story is like a film noir, with femme fatales (María and Angélica) and other shady characters who, as usual, always know more than they're letting on. It's easy to imagine the sunlight illuminating the creepier parts of city, revealing glorious filth and debauchery, and it makes for a nice contrast to the story's underlying darkness. García Madero, for all his aloofness, isn't a very reliable narrator; he relates the story in careful detail, but his tone, and the overall atmosphere of distrust (and misplaced trust) makes me wonder if he's telling the whole story.

And this, I'm beginning to realize, seems to be one of Bolaño's trademarks: read The Savage Detectives and 2666 and you wonder what's going on, who's the telling the truth, and where, exactly, Bolaño is leading you. The most unsettling aspect of both novels is that even Bolaño himself, hovering in the background, isn't reliable; there's more going on than he wants to tell. He reveals his secrets in tiny flashes, and the important question suddenly inverts itself: in both novels, it isn't whether or not you can trust Bolaño; rather, he seems to be asking whether or not he can trust you.

Just a short note to those of you still with me: I recommend Laird Hunt's The Exquisite. It's one of the strangest, most jarring books I've read in a good, long while.

Also recommended: Stephen Graham Jones's Demon Theory. It's written like a really bad slasher flick. Certainly worth a look, especially once Halloween rolls around. (But does horror ever really go out of season?)

I'll let you know how Sam Savage's Firmin goes. I've been looking forward to it for quite some time.

Happy ninetieth, Mr. Salinger. So what have you been up to?

Mr. Salinger's disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren't middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel "The Catcher in the Rye," which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. "Nine Stories," published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. "Franny and Zooey," a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction," appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger's to appear in print was "Hapworth 16, 1924," a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the '70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late '80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.

So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn't written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.